Nurse crops between fruit trees

[garnetmoth]

Great ideas here, thanks for the thread!
I just picked up some beet and horseradish cultured veggies from the farmers market. its SOOOO going with shepherds pie for Saturday dinner!
Ill work on increasing our yarrow and plantain. Our bunnies LOVE plantain and its such a tidy plant, I have been seeding it in most areas. I have mixed my grasses with my alfalfa seed, so Ill do it on the other side of the path from the fruit trees.

[mnjrutherford]

Feb 10, 2011 2:04:19 GMT -5 synergy said:

mnjrutherford, that is the first i ever heard of a truffle orchard, so I googled and found them growing on the west coast and friendly in our zone too. I am already planting hazelnut so now think I might get some innoculated trees to interplant. I found black truffle growing in my woodfibre riding ring the last two years and didn't have a clue what it was until I identified it this year, they look like hunks of some sort of unrefined petroleum, I did not even know it was a fungus first seeing them. I was going to take pictures and an assistant turned a horse loose in the ring and it trampled the area.

How did you plant yours? I will plant a conventional 12 feet between trees but I see others plant a thick row.

Several issues here. Yes, you do have a type of truffle that is native in your area. It isn't the Perigord type that is native to France. Typically, it doesn't fetch the prices the Perigord do, but I have heard that it is quite good never the less.

2. I don't think you can grow the French truffle in your area. You will need to ask an expert that question.

3. WHO is an expert? Well, that is subject to debate by the experts themselves. All I can tell you is that I get our trees from Franklin Garland. www.garlandtruffles.com/ I think you'll get the best information here.

4. What we were told is that you should not plant inoculated trees in an area that has had other trees growing there within the past 10 years. Why? Because the "germ" is very delicate and the competing local "germs" will kill off the inoculant.

5. If you do decide to get trees, they need to be planted in soil with a ph of 7.5. This is very important for the survival of the germ. It is also kinda hard to achieve and people will tell you how crazy you are for even thinking of doing it. So, get your soil tested ASAP. We get our soil tested free through the county cooperative extension service. For the truffles to actually fruit, you will need to bring the ph up to 8 over the years to induce fruiting. It takes 6 to 7 years for truffles to fruit, though some of Franklin's trees have been known to fruit within as little as 4 years. It takes up to 10 years for an orchard to come into full production.

DEFINITELY talk to someone more knowledgeable than me before you do more than get your soil tested. I totally encourage you to look into this.

[robertb]

Comfrey seems to vary a lot. People always complain about it seeding all over the place, but not one of my clumps - of different strains - has ever done anything of the sort. They've all stayed where I put them. It may depend on local conditions.

[synergy]

The truffle growing here is black and fruits in summer so may be the Burgundy truffle or a like variety that still looks like the black winter type.

There are commercially grown Black Perigord in our region . There are innoculated trees available for sale here and I think I will get a few to do a little small scale experimentation. Unfortunately I do not think they care whatsoever about the nut production side and I do . They really do not appear to be selective of stock that produce superior nuts, they seem to be anticipating the truffles to be a huge cash cow crop.

[ottawagardener]

Robert: This is my experience with Jeruselum Artichoke. It moves outward from its patch but doesn't seed around and is distinctive so I don't see it as particularly invasive. Not so for creeping bellflower. I don't know how comfrey behaves around here but the local wild flower garden has a goodly supply of it which I'm guessing has seeded itself around.

[mnjrutherford]

Feb 10, 2011 16:12:35 GMT -5 synergy said:

Unfortunately I do not think they care whatsoever about the nut production side and I do .

I have the same issue. The answer Franklin gave me was that the high ph necessary for truffle fruiting renders the nuts to small for commercial use. So, I'm a tad clueless there particularly since our hazelnuts are not doing so well to begin with. We are having much better luck with the oaks.

So, I have a few unproven theories on the whole thing. Our trees are not growing so well. There are several potential reasons:

1. They have not been fertilized because we were told not to. Why? Because fertilizer lowers the ph.
2. They were planted during a drought and we did not have an adequate watering system.
3. We were ignorant when we started. We are much more knowledgeable now!

I have read that Rock Roses are good to interplant because they exude a certain chemical from the roots that facilitates the growth of the spore and it's transmission through the soil. I read this in an online research paper once, about 2 or 3 years ago and I have never been able to find it again. When I put the question to Franklin, he said that since the spore doesn't grow on the roots, it's pointless to put it in the orchard. I didn't really find that to be a satisfactory answer and since he's a very busy person, I didn't push the issue.

I've been tracking down rock roses ever since. Jack has sent me some seed from France (THANK YOU! ;D) and I have them in soil in a south facing window now. There are also some seed listed in "The Fragrant Path" and I'm ordering some.

There are a couple of other issues with the rock roses that are good to know:
1. They are supposedly very popular in the UK and there are clubs or societies that grow them competitively.
2. They produce an exudate, a resinous stuff, that can be collected and sold into the perfume industry.

hmmm... There's a couple other things I thought to mention when I started typing this out and they have left the station along with my memory.

OH! Nuts! Even if the orchard does not produce saleable nuts, the trees will probably still release pollen. You need several varieties that are compatible in order to achieve nuts to begin with. So, if you plant small nut varieties in the orchard that can pollinate larger nut varieties planted in an adjacent area, you can have your nuts and eat them too!

[synergy]

My apologies for going off topic but I am fascinated with the truffles.

I am really so new to gardening my ideas are just off the cuff and ignorant but I was under the impression that raising the ph to be higher in alkalinity gave the specific truffle fungi a competitive advantage over more aggesssive fungi that may be native here and thrive in more acidic soils but the natives may be disadvantaged by the higher ph. Many references I read said the truffle do grow and fruit in acidic soils .
If they thrive at the drip line and the plants will be growing a lot I almost thought planting them at tight intervals side by side in rows might actually sell more stock but produce less than spaced further apart if the fungi actually thrive at the drip line in the growing roots for whatever factors? Moisture? Some of the protocals these people used did not make sense to me. Did they learn these expert opinions from from centuries of tried and true or is this speculated as improved methods of production?

I am not thinking a large commerical production , just enough nuts to supplement my family and extended families diet and same with truffles , or maybe selling to one restaurant to augment a little income in season. So I am thinking well spaced small production ( I have a really little farm of 4 acres mixed use ) I also I have seen compactly planted monoculture hazelnut orchards wiped out so I am thinking close enough to cross polinate but interplanted and I was thinking that if I bought a few that were innoculated, maybe the roots growing towards those of the next tree would actually innoculate them in the future to begin producing truffle? Also I was thinking even spaced at every ten feet I might have an opportunity to coppice some hazel for use of the wood at spaced out time intervals.

It seems to me most of these new world endeavours just have dollar signs in mind thus don't care about the quality nut trees that would be able to support truffle propagation too. I want a much more integrated approach to anything I undertake .

These ideas of interplanting between fruit trees and guilds , I sometimes think they are missing the practical issues of having clear ground to harvest nuts and fruit and the trampling of ground during pruning , harvest etc. Since alfalpha does not grow here , I like the idea of clover intermixed with grass and having foraging geese to keep the groundcovers eaten down in the orchard.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

My favorite ground-cover in an orchard is strawberries.

[mnjrutherford]

Well, Franklin talks about his work in-depth on his web site. He's been working on developing his methods since the 70s and he and his wife Betty have traveled and studied in France, Spain, and I think Italy as well; for a good part of those years. So, as to whether it's old tried and true knowledge or is it newfangled stuff, I would have to say that it's a blend of both.

On the ph issues you mention in the first paragraph, you got me there. I don't have a clue. That was what they told us and we've gone with it. I never even gave a thought to the point of view you've put out. I sure hope you call or email them and ask! Don't forget to share the answer! ;o)

Now, from what we've learned, you should try to have at least 50 trees within a 1/4 acre. We've lost a lot of our original trees and have to replace them. We are planting them at 10' intervals in both directions. We were doing a 5:1 of hazels and oaks with the idea that as the oaks get to big to be so close to the hazels, the hazels would be at the end of their natural life and could be removed without any issues. That's 50 years. That would leave enough space that a new oak could be put in the middle as well.

We have 2 acres at the moment so a 1/4 acre orchard was the best we could afford to do.

Joseph, I LOVE your idea! Would the strawberries do well in the high ph?

[synergy]

Yes strawberries sounds interesting, in rows? Matting the ground ?
I lived on a rocky site and hauled dirt to build pockets for dwarf fruit trees and planted wild strawberry types that I allowed to mat as groundcover but never lived there long enough to see my idea come to fruit so to speak.

Mixed in with beasties and veggies , fruit etc. I can only get about twelve hazelnut total, everything here is very synergistic with areas serving dual purposes, hence the thought that fungi and nut trees are a good partnership. They grow innoculated oak and willow too. The problem with oak is the leaves are toxic if ingested by my animals so I am reluctant to plant them as I mix the use of so much of my land. I even use my pergola for summer shade for beasties though the horses will eat the grape leaves so I put temporary 'gates' (made of discarded headboards from beds held in place with chains between the upright posts of the pergola to restrict a small area for shade in the heat of summer under the kiwi portion of my pergola. I must say the headboards look super nice and moving them later is a snap and I store them under an eave in fall when the animals are not allowed there. Futon frames work fantastic too as sort of alternative small scale fencing that is free and easy to move (now you guys know I am a crackpot )

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I used strawberries as a ground-cover in my orchard. They did great with a couple weedings per year. They started out in rows, but that lasted one summer. The productivity wasn't all that great compared to a dedicated strawberry bed, but they produced lots more berries than I could pick or eat.

I don't fuss with pH... I'm not going to be able to change the pH of my limestone based soil so I just plant what I want, and if it does poorly I plant a different variety until I give up on trying to grow that species.

The other plants I have in my orchard as ground cover are spearmint and raspberries. Both of them love growing under the trees, and are no fuss. The mint patch doesn't need weeding. I just mow it first thing in the spring before plant growth starts. And the raspberries out-compete any weed that can tolerate the shade.

[ottawagardener]

Let's see: mint, horseradish and comfrey. That should terrify the weeds Actually there are some native mints around here that might be a good addition. Some are growing on the property. I can't wait until spring to do a proper survey of what's here. There are raspberries but they don't seem to be a highly producing clone or they have a virus or something. Not sure, only the previous owner said they didn't produce much fruit. That or the animals get them.

[mnjrutherford]

Today is a good day for trimming. Mike is burning weeds in the orchard. I've been mentally debating if I should pull the hazel suckers and stick them down into the soil along the drip line to see if they take root. The debate has several issues that I would like to put to Franklin but won't because his time is valuable and he doesn't appreciate answering questions when he isn't receiving any remuneration. I respect that, but it still leaves us in a bit of a quandary.

So, here are some of the issues that are popping into my head:

1. Will a good, productive tree come from a sucker?
2. Since the sucker was produced in hopefully infected soil, replanted suckers should help to continue the infection process, right?
3. What if the the soil isn't infected?

There are a few other questions in my mind, but naturally enough I can't think of them now that I want to pose them here. ::sigh::

[synergy]

I got most of my hazelnut saplings from an 80 year old grower who had supplied nurseries for years and he advocated dividing suckers with a portion of root from the best producing trees and transplanting that as the most reliable way to propagate for best traits. He said that planting nuts or digging up those saplings from germinated nuts would be hit and miss and you really don't know what you have until the tree is five years old or so and starts producing nuts. I should think that the soil and roots are innoculated from the stock you initially bought and that would transfer some of the mycelium colony with the root and soil from any divided sucker, well that part is my guess. The surrounding soil should be part of the growing medium for the mycelium strands so if those inital saplings are innoculated then I should think that is then colonized over time, maybe not the first few yers and there may be some failure rate where the truffle mycelium jsut fails to thrive or outcompete other fungi ?
Suckers off the more established trees that are hosting truffle production should in theory be reliable to transfer the fungus .

[mnjrutherford]

Feb 13, 2011 23:19:37 GMT -5 synergy said:

I should think that the soil and roots are innoculated from the stock you initially bought and that would transfer some of the mycelium colony with the root and soil from any divided sucker, well that part is my guess. The surrounding soil should be part of the growing medium for the mycelium strands so if those inital saplings are innoculated then I should think that is then colonized over time, maybe not the first few yers and there may be some failure rate where the truffle mycelium jsut fails to thrive or outcompete other fungi ?
Suckers off the more established trees that are hosting truffle production should in theory be reliable to transfer the fungus .

That's what I'm hoping. Problem is, I can't actually test the soil, or at least I don't know how to test the soil, to find out if the mycelium did indeed survive. As far as I know, there is no test. Add to that, there were a couple of problems when we planted, i.e. the ph was only about 7 and it should have been 7.5 when we planted. Also, the drought. Also, last year, we had a fungus attacking a few of the trees in one corner.

If ONLY I could do some sort of test!?!?!